Utter rubbish, Britain's economic decline began around the end of World War 1.
I can possibly agree with the idea of a social decline beginning during the Thatcher years, but i'd like to see some sort of definition of social decline first.
Jews have not been persecuted since medieval times.
Christians have NEVER been persecuted.

Makes a similar point though. To my mind, there hasn't been a Prime Minister of the UK that has pronounced themselves as anything other than a Christian.

As for poor old Norman Hill, tough shit. Christianity has been coasting by on being the state religion for too damn long, and ever since other religions have been trying to claim their rightful slice of the pie, you're pitching a fit that there's not as much pie for you as their used to be.
Maybe I'm being a bastard but I long for the day when members of the Church of England dwindle to such a point that the idea of it being the state religion becomes hilariously outdated. And since they're about to split (again) over gay marriage and female bishops, that day is coming sooner.

Actually, I'd like to differ here. I see the end of the UK as a superpower ("The Fall of London" so to speak) with the American Revolution. Sure there were decisive victories afterwards, but more and more colonies became more and more independent, making the loss of power clearer and clearer.
As a good example of this would be Britain and France not being able to beat the unified German both times they tried, each time only after the US entered the war, the victories were accomplished.
The loss of the Indian subcontinent was a milestone in this, also because after that Brits simply gave up on having an Empire - and the math agrees to this day.
I think we can call it for the UK when Scotland secedes/becomes independent, also because than it's just K.

Now I put in the picture of Thatcher and Reagan as hyperbole, but in both the US and the UK the spirit of these neolibertarian Friedmannian economics wrecked the country, even though it was a short term success if you trust traditional methods of economic meassuring (GDP etc.), it still was a short time success. But in the long run it poisened the well of political ideas and radicalized conservatives in both countries on economic terms. Surely, the red scare is less pure in the UK - since having a long standing socialist and poor lower class makes it harder for it to be eradicated (relatively to Europe, the United States are agrarian) - but it is much more widespread than even Germany, and after all, "half" of that was ruled by communists for 40 years.
The main reason why they fucked up their countries is because the entirty of economic ideas was focused into a single ideology. It's the reason why no contemporary British politician has a good solution to the crisis - there simply is only one dogma - which fucked it up in the first place. The same has happend as in Germany, were both major parties have essentially the same economic ideas, the only difference being their social policies.

I have no idea what Norman means with social decline, but as he is crazy, I'm saying social decline means people he doesn't like are happier than before.

Actually, they were pretty much persecuted throughout the history of the Roman empire, until Christianity finally became the state religion. (At which point Christians, finally in power and free from oppression, could turn to the important matter of persecuting the wrong kind of Christian).

@Gloria

I got lazy, I admit. I glanced over the post, thinking it was yet another one of those diatribes we've been deluged with about moving to another country after Obama's re-election. But my point still holds. How many avowed atheists can be said to hold high office today, as opposed to avowedly religious people? Pick any country or government you like. I think you'll find the results to be fairly uniform.